Net Neutrality
This is one of those stories that seems to be extremely simple. We as consumers should want the government to protect us against monopolistic internet service providers who have a conflict of interest in the service that they provide. Before I get into this I want to say that this is my opinion and you can get both sides of the story here. I got the idea to discuss this from reading a recent story at FT.com, which you can read here.
I want to give my opinion so that you know where I stand on this issue. I agree with Net Neutrality (NN). I think that companies who control the internet like Comcast and others are going to have a conflict of interest when it comes to what content they allow through to their customers. Comcast was just taken over by NBC Universal and the U.S. government is concerned that they might favour their content over that of other companies. A company’s mandate is to provide value to the shareholders, not the customers and if there are limited options available to the consumers then they will be able to get away with it.
People that are arguing that they will switch are being naive in my opinion. As someone who lives in Canada and has a cell phone, I know all too well how that argument works out. We have a few very large cell phone service providers and they are all equally horrible in terms of price and customer service. I have switched between them and found them all to be bad. In Canada we have some of the most expensive mobile rates in the world. This market is very similar to the ISP market in the U.S. That means to me that these ISPs will be censoring content from competing companies and the internet will no longer be a place that people can go to get truthful information.
Another point is that these companies will not be as blatant as blocking companies altogether, they will just give more and faster bandwidth to preferred companies. People will not know this is happening and assume that these other companies just have terrible websites and stop paying attention to them.
What does this mean for new businesses is that it will be much harder to crack into an incumbent’s market because getting out the message will be much harder. They will not be able to use their social media and internet marketing as effectively and that might be the only way that they could compete in the first place.
For a country like the U.S., which prides itself on competition and free markets, this NN regulation seems to be a step in that direction.
Jason